• 224 Posts
  • 366 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle

  • I’m inclined to support 18 as the age of full legal responsibility in society, which is why I favour moving the voting age to 17.

    In Australia, adults in prison who are expected to be released during the upcoming electoral term are allowed to vote, as they will return to society during that term. I think a similar principle should apply to 17-year-olds: they will be 18 for the majority of the term being voted on and should have a say in the government that will represent them when they are an adult.

    The average 17-year-old is about 17.5 years old at any point in the year. This means that, on average, they miss out on roughly 2.5 to 3 years of democratic representation if they cannot vote in the election preceding their 18th birthday. While age thresholds are somewhat arbitrary, they are necessary for consistency in law in balancing different rates of maturity uniformly. And although many 16-year-olds may be as intellectually capable as adults, the difference in maturity and development year-on-year at these younger ages are still significant.

    I believe the case for including 17-year-olds is much stronger than for 16-year-olds. The average 17-year-old misses out on about 30 months of representation, compared to around 18 months for the average 16-year-old. A meaningful difference.

    TL;DR: For these reasons, I support allowing 17-year-olds to vote, on behalf of their adult selves, for the government that will represent them for most of the term, once they turn 18.


















  • It’s a massive gain for Australia. When they lost their moderate seats to the Teals, the party room became disproportionately alt-right despite existing in a voting system that demands moderates.

    The cooker influence told them that Trumpism was the way forward and to win government again, when that only worked by disenfranchising voters. When everyone votes, a political culture that thrives on the extreme works the opposite.

    American politicians need to go overboard to compete for attention just to get people to turn up and vote based on anger and fear, the people in the middle of the spectrum get disenfranchised more as both two-party single vote options stretch further from them to garner good or bad attention. This results in no vote, which is nowhere near as bad as a vote transferring to the opposition.

    In a mandatory/preference country, hyperbole and extremism costs you the vote and because they have to vote still, your lost vote goes to the opposition and is a net change of -2 votes. 1 less vote + 1 opposition gained vote.

    Peter Dutton was the leader amongst the right wing faction of the party when they had the moderate Liberal members, when Turnbull lost the leadership it was due to an internal power struggle from the right wing of the party room. At the time Morrison won because he was perceived to be both a moderate and somewhat conservative, when the room included the former Teal seat moderates they kept the leadership from going more fringe with Dutton.

    Without the moderate members that lost to the Teals, the right wing of the Liberal Party had the majority of the party room and they put their leader in charge despite what happened in American being counter and unrepeatable to our much better voting system.

    Now that the Liberal party has gotten a proper swift kick up the bum for letting themselves shift too far from center, with the leader changed in the process, if they have any sense they will realise how much they got wrong or they’ll never win another election.

    They have no choice now but to level and rebuilt their party, or the Commonwealth will become like Victoria and WA, having no second party option while the rusted on Liberal voters cost everyone the opportunity of a new second party emerging.